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Not so Extreme Makeover: Man-Cave to Craft Haven

Over the last couple of weeks, I have dedicated some time to sorting out the study. By ‘sorting out’, I mean completely changing its designated role from ‘ramshackle study-cum-mancave’ to ‘lovely crafty room of awesomeness’. I was aided and abetted in this feat of engineering by my dear and long-suffering husband (LSH), who, as you have heard before, suffers from a not too mild case of OCD. I quickly realised that, if I left my crafty ‘guff’,as he calls it, (just wait until I get round to those hand knitted socks, he’ll be scoffing on the other side of his well-attired toes) lying around for long enough, then eventually my ‘change of use’ application would be approved for the study. Ahem, craft room. It only took 3 months of sewing machines on the dining table and various piles of patterns, books, fabric and notions being all over the living room for him to agree to my hostile takeover. That, plus the Babybee is now disturbingly mobile and in the habit of inserting anything she gets her grubby little toast hands on to into her cakehole, with little to no regard as to how life-limiting putting said object into her mouth will be.

View from the workstation.

So, in order to accommodate my sewing machine and new overlocker, I needed a large table. As wide as the room, please, Squire, if you don’t mind. Off to town LSH went, in search of suitable material, and found what he thought was laminated MDF to construct my workbench. He thought it would be ready the next day, as this is what the man behind the counter said, however, after driving 30 minutes to pick it up the next day, it wasn’t ready. Not to worry, said shopkeeper would deliver it on Sunday. Well, he would deliver something different to what LSH thought he had ordered, then promptly ask whether he wanted to sell his bike, which was in the garage. TIA*, people, TIA.

One's new overlocker!

I had expressed the requirement for there to be come carpet on the workbench, as the craft room is directly adjacent to Wee One’s room, and as I only get to do fun stuff like sewing when she is asleep, I didn’t want the noise to wake her up. They don’t really go in for carpets much in this part of South Africa as it is very hot, so getting hold of some was not as straightforward as one might imagine. Luckily, Mr Shinybees wandered into a seemingly-unrelated-to-carpet type shop, and found some adhesive carpet tiles, because that is how things roll around here. These were installed on said MDF and voila! One sewing bench – slightly Heath Robinson, very functional.

Organised, at long last...

I commandeered several IKEA plastic boxes from the baby’s room, which had housed lots of her outgrown clothes, and swapped them for the crocodile boxes I had been using for my stash. They are a bit wider than the IKEA ones, and would not fit nicely across the shelf. They are also opaque, which means you have to open each one to fine what you want. I put the old baby clothes in the crocodile boxes, thereby having to spend nothing on boxes to store the yarn! From what I remember, the IKEA boxes were only a couple of pounds each to start with. I also have started to collect a lot of cotton whilst doing the sewing course (and now for the overlocker), so I decided to use a couple of plastic shoeboxes to store the bobbins and my button and ribbon collections in. These came from Argos originally I believe, so again, a bit of nifty recycling done there.

Fabric stash - less populous than yarn stash, thankfully.

As I am a lovely and generous wife, I decided to allocate the shelving that I can’t quite reach easily to LSH, who promptly covered it in random electronics guff. I don’t mind this too much, as he is fairly handy at fixing all manner of broken household equipment.